The Pharaoh's Secret (14 page)

Kurt snapped his head around as the gunfire echoed from the depths of the warehouse.

“Damn,” he muttered. He propped himself up to get a better look.

Joe took cover and Kurt turned his attention back down the aisle toward the battle. The man in the tux and woman in the evening gown were exchanging fire with the group who were impersonating the security guards. They were taking shots from two directions, but they didn’t seem to be panicking. Rather, they were systematically dropping back and using single shots as covering fire.

They hastened their retreat when one of the guards went wild with a submachine gun and took out a stack of clay amphorae.
Shards of pottery blasted into the aisle and clay dust filled the air. Stray bullets tore through the warehouse, several hitting the glass-walled tank and leaving star chips and hairline cracks in the glass.

The man in the tux dove to avoid the onslaught and then scrambled back to his feet. He grabbed the woman and moved back farther, using the corner of the intersection as a spot to fire from. Kurt listened as the man spoke. “MacD, this is the Chairman. We’re getting pounded in here. We need extraction pronto!”

The Chairman . . .

The woman turned and fired in another direction. “They’re surrounding us, Juan. We need to move now.”

Juan, Kurt thought. Juan Cabrillo?

Juan Cabrillo, Chairman of the Corporation, a man who’d lost a leg helping Dirk Pitt on a NUMA operation years back. He was captain of the
Oregon
, a freighter that looked like a beat-up old wreck on the outside but which was actually crammed to the gills with the most advanced weaponry, propulsion gear and electronics.

Kurt wasn’t sure what on earth Juan and his friend were doing in the warehouse, but he knew they were in trouble, outnumbered and on the verge of being surrounded. As cross fire kept them pinned down, a third group of guards appeared, rushing down the aisle in front of Kurt and readying a block of C-4 to throw at Cabrillo.

Kurt sprang into action, put his shoulder to the cannon and shoved it toward the glass. It rocked forward in the sling, ramming its nose against the wall of the tank. Cracks slithered diagonally along the glass, but the wall held.

The cannon barrel recoiled in his direction and then began to
swing forward again. Kurt pushed even harder. This time, the five-hundred-pound bulk of the cannon slammed home like a battering ram. The glass shattered. Ten thousand gallons of water poured out and swept across the floor. It crashed into the men with the explosives and knocked them into the shelving on the far side of the aisle.

Kurt was swept out, winding up on top of one of the gunmen. He reared up and gave the man a thunderous shot to the jaw.

The second assailant was getting to his feet when an object crashed into his head, rifled from somewhere up above by Joe Zavala’s strong arm.

Kurt went for the block of explosives, pulled the two electrical probes out of it and shouted in Cabrillo’s direction, “Juan, this way!”

Cabrillo glanced up the aisle, hesitating, as if it were a ruse.

“Hurry!” Kurt shouted. “You’re getting surrounded.”

The hesitation passed. “Go,” Cabrillo said to his partner.

She ran without hesitation as Cabrillo fired off another round before joining her and crouching down beside Kurt.

“Kurt Austin,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “What brings you to this shindig?”

“Saving your hide, by the looks of it,” Kurt said. “And you?”

“Long story,” Cabrillo replied. “It’s related to the thing in Monaco.”

Even though he’d been busy, Kurt had heard of the destruction at the Monaco Grand Prix. For the past few days, it had been competing with the incident on Lampedusa for airtime in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. He grabbed a pistol from the man he’d knocked cold and joined the battle.

The men posing as guards took cover. Facing three defenders
instead of two, and having seen their reinforcements wiped out by the flood, they quickly became more cautious. Stalemate.

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” the woman said.

Cabrillo made a stab at it in his understated way. “Old friend” was all he said.

Kurt looked her over. He wondered who she might be. “I don’t suppose your name is Sophie?”

She glared at him. “Naomi,” she replied.

Kurt shrugged. “It was worth a shot.”

Cabrillo grinned at the exchange, then turned back to Kurt. “What are you really doing here?”

Kurt pointed toward the men they were fighting. “Those men have something to do with the disaster on Lampedusa.”

“Is NUMA investigating that?”

“By way of another government,” Kurt said.

Cabrillo nodded. “Sounds like we’ve both got our hands full. Anything I can do to help?”

A new series of shots came in. All three of them pressed deeper into the recess under the lowest shelf. When they returned fire, the assailants pulled back once more.

“Not sure,” Kurt said. “It’s all connected to some Egyptian artifacts I hoped to find here.”

“Good luck finding anything in this place,” Cabrillo said. “We’ve been looking for a book Napoleon had on Saint Helena.”

The woman shot him an icy gaze, but Juan ignored it.

“An old copy of the
Odyssey
?” Kurt said. “With some handwritten notes in the margin?”

“That’s the one. Have you seen it?”

Kurt pointed toward their adversaries. “That way.”

By now, the gunfire had dwindled to the occasional random
shot. With each group in a protected area and the space in between empty and dangerous.

“They seem intent on keeping us from heading
that way
,” Juan noted.

“I’ve got a solution,” Kurt said. He looked up and whistled to Joe.

Joe resumed his climb to the smoke detector. He made it to the highest point on the upper shelf but couldn’t reach the sensor. He moved a box out of the way and stretched, an effort that put him out in the open. One gunman fired. Bullets began punching holes in the ceiling around Joe.

Kurt looked down the aisle and raised his pistol, but Cabrillo fired first. The assailant fell with a single shot.

With the coast clear, Joe reached for the smoke detector again and pressed the Taser against it. The heat of four thousand volts of snapping and sparking was instantly picked up as a potential fire. Alarms began to screech, strobes began flashing and jets of CO
2
blasted out into the open space of the warehouse.

The assailants waited only seconds before making a run for it. The CO
2
stopped pumping shortly after Joe pulled the Taser away from the sensor, but the authorities would be coming.

“Forty feet past that intersection,” he said to Cabrillo. “First shelf on the left. I’d hurry, if I were you.”

Cabrillo offered a hand. “Till next time.”

Kurt shook it. “Over drinks instead of bullets.”

With that, Cabrillo and the woman took off and Joe finished climbing back down to the ground level.

“Was that who I think it was?” Joe said as soon as he landed.

Kurt nodded. “You meet the nicest people in warehouses like this. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

They made their way to the loading dock only to discover a sea
of fire engines and police cars pulling into the back lot. Unmarked vehicles, filled with members of the gala’s real security team, were racing up as well.

“Side door,” Joe suggested.

They ducked back into the warehouse and hustled across it to another exit. Joe looked through the door into an alleyway. “Looks clear.”

They pushed out into the alley, but lights swung into the space before they’d gone five steps. A spotlight zeroed in on them and lit them up, as the flashing red-and-blue light bar on the roof dazzled. Both of them stopped in their tracks and put up their hands.

“Maybe it’ll be the same cops who arrested us the other day,” Joe suggested. “They were awfully nice.”

“We should be so lucky,” Kurt said.

The car stopped and two officers in uniform stepped out with guns raised. Kurt and Joe didn’t resist. They were cuffed, placed into the car and hauled off in record time. Kurt noticed they were being driven away from the center of town instead of toward it and its all-too-familiar police station. “We get to make a phone call, don’t we?”

A smiling face turned to look at them. “One’s already been made on your behalf,” the man said. Strangely, he spoke with a Louisiana drawl instead of a Mediterranean accent. “By the Chairman himself.”

The officer tossed a set of keys in Kurt’s lap. “MacD,” the man said, introducing himself. “Your friend in low places.”

Kurt grinned, unlocked his cuffs and then Joe’s. The lights and siren were shut off, the car continued down the road and several minutes later Kurt and Joe were dropped off only two blocks from their hotel.

“Thanks for the extraction,” Kurt said. “Tell Juan the first drink is on me.”

MacD smiled. “He’ll never let you pay, but I’ll be sure to tell him you offered.” Kurt shut the door. MacD motioned to the driver and the car moved off.

“Any chance we can draft Juan and his crew for this mission?” Joe asked.

“Seems like they’ve got their own problems to deal with,” Kurt replied.

He turned toward the hotel and began walking. They were free and clear, soaking wet, ears ringing from the gunfight, but the street was deserted and it was quiet all around. And despite all that—despite what they’d risked—they were no closer to an answer than they’d been the day before.

“Strange evening,” Kurt said.

“That’s the understatement of the year,” Joe replied.

They snuck into the hotel, rode the freight elevator up to their floor and trudged wearily to their room, discovering Renata waiting inside. Unlike them, she was beaming.

“You guys look terrible!”

Kurt didn’t doubt that. “Something tells me your night went a lot better than ours,” he said, closing the door and slumping down in the nearest chair.

“I should have known all those police cars were your doing.”

“Not just ours,” Joe said. “It
was
a party no one’s going to forget.”

Kurt hoped Renata had something of substance behind her smile. “Tell me you’ve found Sophie C.”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Renata said. “And she’s not far from here at all.”

The news gave Kurt a jolt of energy. “When do we meet her?”

“Hopefully, not for a very long time,” Renata replied. “She’s no longer among the living.”

That was bad news. Or so Kurt thought. “You don’t seem very upset about that.”

“Well, it
has
been a while,” Renata replied. “She passed away in 1822.”

Kurt looked at Joe. “This making any sense to you?”

Joe shook his head. “The CO
2
has affected my advanced reasoning skills and I’m not hearing this right.”

“I know you’re having fun with this,” he said, “but let’s cut to the chase. Who is Sophie C.? And what could a woman who died
in 1822 possibly have in connection with Dr. Kensington and the Lampedusa attack?”

“Sophie C.,” Renata said, “is short for
Sophie Celine
.”

“I was so close,” Joe said.

Kurt didn’t even respond to that. “Go on.”

“Sophie Celine was the third cousin, and the distant love, of Pierre Andeen, a prestigious member of the French Legislative Assembly, which convened after the Revolution. Because both were married to other people, they were unable to officially be together but that didn’t stop them from having a child.”

“Scandalous,” Kurt said.

“Indeed,” Renata added. “Scandalous or not, the birth of that child was a thrilling moment for Andeen and he used his influence with the French Admiralty to have a ship named after the mother.”

“As some kind of present,” Kurt said.

“Trust me,” Joe said. “Most women prefer jewelry.”

“Agreed,” Renata said.

“So what happened to Sophie?” Kurt asked.

Renata put her feet up. “She lived to a ripe old age and was buried in a private cemetery outside Paris after she died in her sleep.”

Kurt could see where this was going. “I’m guessing it’s
Sophie Celine
, the ship that Kensington was referring to.”

Renata nodded and handed Kurt a printout on the ship’s history. “The
Sophie C
. was attached to Napoleon’s Mediterranean fleet and happened to be berthed in Malta during the brief period of French rule. As luck would have it, the ship went down in a storm after leaving here loaded with French treasure that had been plundered from Egypt. She was found and the wreck excavated by members of the D’Campion Conservancy, a nonprofit group
supported by a wealthy family here on Malta. After keeping the artifacts in their private collection for years, they’ve recently decided to sell some of the items. The museum was to be the intermediary, for a percentage.”

“The same items our violent friends just lifted without paying a penny,” Joe said.

“Kensington said two hundred thousand wouldn’t get them a seat at the table, so they took the whole buffet.”

Joe asked the obvious question: “Why would Kensington point us to the
Sophie Celine
when he wouldn’t even tell us what was going to be in the auction?”

“The same reason these guys didn’t kill him and take the artifacts until we showed up and started asking questions. There must be something on that wreck they still want, something that hasn’t come up yet.”

“The Egyptian tablets I saw were broken,” Joe said. “Partial pieces, fragments. Maybe they’re after the remaining sections.”

Kurt turned to Renata. “Where’s this wreck?”

“Here’s the location,” she said, handing Kurt the rest of her notes. “It’s about thirty miles east of Valletta.”

“Last I checked, that wasn’t the way to France,” Kurt said.

“Her captain was trying to avoid British ships. He planned a route east and then north, either intending to skirt the coast of Sicily or to cut through the strait between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Apparently, he ran into bad weather before he had the chance to do either. The guess is he turned back but never made it to port.”

For the first time in days, Kurt felt they were getting ahead of the game.

“I guess we know our next move,” Joe said. “And
their
move as well. When they find out these carvings and tablets are only
partials and fragments, they’ll go after that wreck and try to salvage what’s left on it themselves.”

“That’s what I would do,” Kurt said. “I still can’t imagine how this all connects or what they’re after, but if it didn’t truly matter, they’d have cut and run by now. Something tells me we’d better dive on this wreck site before they do.”